January 5, 1930. Russian leader Joseph Stalin declares that all farmland in the Soviet Union will henceforth be “collectively owned” by the people. Russian peasant farmers will now be expected to work on huge state-owned collective farms instead of framing their own small plots of land.

February, 1930. In Spain, General Primero de Rivera resigns his military dictatorship. Riots and labor strikes ensue as the government is in disarray.

February 18, 1930. U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh spots a new planet in our solar system and names it Pluto after the Roman god of the underworld. For more information about the life and history of the planet/non-planet Pluto, see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book, The Pluto Files. Reviewed here by S. Krishna. Reviewed by Carrie at Five Minutes for Books.

February 26, 1930. New York City installs traffic lights at Manhattan intersections. The traffic light was developed by black businessman Garrett A. Morgan, who also invented the gas mask.

April 6, 1930. Mahatma Gandhi reaches the coast after a 240-mile protest march across India. There he breaks British laws by making salt in a protest against the British salt tax, a tax that Gandhi has chosen as the first target of satyagraha, his program of non-violent protest and civil disobedience. Read more at Wikipedia about the Salt March.

April 24, 1930. Amy Johnson arrives in Darwin, Australia, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia. The 10,000 mile flight took the aviator nineteen days in her aircraft called Gipsy Moth.

September 14, 1930. National Socialists (Nazis) win 107 seats in the German Parliament (18.3% of all the votes), making them the second largest party in Germany.

October, 1930. Dr. Gertulio Vargas takes power in Brazil after a revolt topples the President-elect, Dr. Julio Prestes and his party which has ruled Brazil for the past forty years.

December, 1930. Dr. Karl Landsteiner wins the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in identifying the major blood types: A, B, AB, and O.

Sometime in 1930: The chocolate chip cookie is accidentally invented by Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, Massachusetts. “Wakefield is said to have been making chocolate cookies and on running out of regular baker’s chocolate, substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate from Nestlé thinking that they would melt and mix into the batter. They did not and the chocolate chip cookie was born.”

This book is one in a series of books called Fabulous Fashions of the Decades, published by Enslow Publishers. I found it on the “new books” shelf at my library in the children’s section, and thought I’d give it a try as a part of my ongoing twentieth century history studies this year.

The book includes lots of good information and photographs, and I learned a few things. I already knew about bobbed haircuts and cloche hats and flapper beads and raccoon coats. But I never connected “bobby pins” with bobbed hair.

“The bobby pin was invented to keep bobbed hair looking neat.”

And did you know that one actress in particular was famous for her “Dutch boy” haircut?

“Actress Louise Brooks was famous for her Dutch boy haircut.”

It also never occurred to me to connect the silky, Egyptian tunic-like fashions of the twenties with the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922.

“People became fascinated with all things Egyptian. There were clothes and shoes with heiroglyphics. Women wore Cleopatra earrings, snake bracelets, and scarab-shaped jewelry.”

There’s a bibliography in the back of the book for the purpose of more research, and there are addresses in the back of the book for a couple of websites where readers can see more fashions of the twenties:

Fashion-Era, Flapper Fashion 1920’s
1920-30.com, Women’s Fashions 1920s

This book, and others in the series, provide a good introduction to fashion history in the twentieth century.

This post is linked to Nonfiction Monday, hosted this week at Jean Little Library.

Newbery Medal for children’s literature:
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field is a doll story that I never much cared for. However, Amy at Hope Is the Word blog says of Hitty, “I never once grew tired of this story; on the contrary, I was eager each time I picked it up to find out what Hitty was going to experience next. My girls seemed to love it as much as I did.” So maybe I just have an impaired attention span.

Nobel Prize for Literature:
Sinclair Lewis, “”for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.” Lewis was the first U.S. writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he didn’t turn it down as he had his Pulitzer in 1926. Lewis said in a letter in1926 that “by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them as the final judges of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience.” I suppose Scandinavian judges of literary excellence are more to trusted/served.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures. I read this play a long time ago from an anthology I found in a closet somewhere. It’s a black dialect version of the highlights of Bible stories, adapted by a white playwright (Marc Connelly) from a book of stories written by another white Southerner (Roark Bradford). I remember being fascinated by the play, but I would imagine that it would be politically incorrect and maybe even offensive to me nowadays.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Laughing Boy: A Navaho Love Story by Oliver La Farge.

Published in 1930:
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I’ve never read anything by Faulkner. I keep intending to read Faulkner, but the books seem so intimidating—and dark.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Good book. Good movie.
The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene. The first of the Nancy Drew series.
The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper. Classic picture book.
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers. The beginning of the romance between novelist Harriet Vane and detective and man-about-town Lord Peter Wimsey. the development of the relationship between Miss Vane and Lord Peter is about my favorite in all of literature. It begins with Lord Peter trying to find evidence that will clear Harriet Vane of the charge of murder.
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. A novel “satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.” It sounds like something I would like to read someday.

The Night of the Burning: Devorah’s Story by Linda Press Wulf. Haunted by the loss of her parents to war and typhus, and driven from her Polish shtetl during the murderous anti-Semitic pogroms of 1921, Devorah, 12, and her younger sister, Nechama, are taken with 200 other Jewish orphans to safety in South Africa’s Jewish community.

An Ocean Apart, a World Away by Lensey Namioka. (Laurel Leaf, 2003) Xueyan, a privileged Chinese girl, is given the opportunity in 1921 to attend Cornell University in the United States. A sequel to Ties That Bind, Ties That Break by the same author.

Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance by Eleanora E. Tate. Celeste goes to visit her almost mythical Aunt Valentina who lives in a mansion in Harlem, an actress who drives a big car and wears fancy clothes.Semicolon review here.

Witness by Karen Hesse. (2001) In a small Vermont town in 1924, the Ku Klux Klan moves in, and citizens are reluctant to do anything about the Klan until a shooting occurs.

Jake’s Orphan by Peggy Brooke. (2000) A twelve-year-old boy takes a job on a North Dakota tree farm in 1926 to escape the Minnesota orphanage where he lives. Recommended for ages 9-12.

Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine. (1999), An orphaned boy sneaks out of the Hebrew Home for Boys and discovers Harlem’s world of jazz in 1926. Recommended for ages 8-12.

Moonshiner’s Gold by John Erickson. A mystery/adventure novel set in the Texas Panhandle in 1925-27. Fourteen-year-old Riley McDaniels’s father has just died, and he and his mother struggle to keep their ranch going. Riding home from school one afternoon, Riley discovers that moonshiners have built a still in a nearby deserted canyon on their property and are making whiskey.

Black Duck by Janet Taylor Lisle. (2006) A fourteen-year-old boy who discovers a dead body on the beach in 1929 and suspects it has something to do with bootlegging.

Bright Young Things by Anna Godberson. YA, probably skews older. Letty Larkspur and Cordelia Grey leave their Midwestern home for the bright lights of Manhattan.

Vixen by Jillima Larkin. Also looks as if it would be best for older teens and twenty-somethings. 17-year-old Gloria Carmody wants to live it up as a flapper in Jazz Age Chicago.

Choosing Up Sides by John Ritter. (1998) An athletically talented thirteen-year-old boy in 1920s Ohio whose father, a fundamentalist preacher, opposes his wish to play baseball. Recommended for ages 10-14.

The Storyteller’s Daughter by Jean Thesman. (1997) A fifteen-year-old girl in Seattle during Prohibition suspects her father may be illegally smuggling rum into the country, just before he disappears.

Chief Sunrise, John McGraw, and Me by Timothy Tocher. (2004) A fifteen-year-old boy leaves his abusive father and goes to New York in to try out for the New York Giants baseball team.

Crossing the Tracks by Barbara Stuber. In the 1920s, Iris’ emotionally distant father sends her to rural Missouri to act as a companion to an elderly woman while he heads to Kansas City with his fiance. Iris’ mother died when she was five, and it takes her some time to learn to care for Mrs. Nesbitt and see her own future with optimism.

The River by Rumer Godden. YA before there was YA, The River tells the story of a young British girl coming of age in India.

More suggestions?